This blog is affiliated with a course at the School of Journalism & Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I'll try to use it to share relevant news and information with the class, and anyone else who's interested.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

First NSA, now DEA - the scope of snooping expands

According to a report in the NY Times, DEA and local drug enforcement officials have had access to decades of information on phone calls compiled in an AT&T database.

The Hemisphere Project is a partnership of federal and local drug enforcement with telecom giant AT&T. Under the Project, AT&T is paid to embed their employees with drug-enforcement units across the country. When presented with an administrative subpoena (granted by the DEA, not a judge or grand jury), the AT&T embed can access AT&T's internal database and provide the specified information.
The AT&T internal database contains records of every call that went through an AT&T switch, user info, and location information. It was originally constructed to facilitate billing, and contains records of all calls going through AT&T switches since 1987. Training slides for Hemisphere personnel (sent to the Times by an activist) stress the secrecy of the project -

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The Obama administration has acknowledged the existence of the Hemisphere Project and its extraordinary scale and scope, but suggested that it's not a privacy issue because the database is maintained by AT&T, and not the government.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties
Union, said the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this
year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises
profound privacy concerns.”

“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it
would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” he said.